Wilmer Valderrama’s habit is one that his social followers may be familiar with (#MyHourADay). But it all started offline during an early morning out in Afghanistan’s arid desert while traveling with the USO.
“Everything was very quiet. I looked up—you could see every star,” he says “The air of the desert was crisp and cold, and I took a deep breath. In that moment, I found this peace that was so much more energizing than calming.”
He also found time.
“I [was] running out of hours in the day to get all the stuff that I’m doing done, [but I knew] I should not negotiate with my fitness,” he says. “So what I did was, I said, ‘Well, then I have to wake up earlier. Then I have more hours in the day.’”
With his current roster of projects, he’s going to need all the hours he can get.
An American Story
He details all these projects in one of his latest undertakings, a memoir that came off Harper Select’s presses in September 2024. In An American Story: Everyone’s Invited, Valderrama chronicles his own American dream: a kid with an accent—against many, if not all, odds—turned star, producer, writer, podcaster, designer, author and advocate, among many other titles.
“The Kid with an Accent” is the title of chapter three, as well as an identity that Valderrama explores extensively throughout the memoir. Valderrama’s family left his father’s native Venezuela for America when he was just 13. He arrived in his new home with a passion for acting, a knack for stirring up a laugh and very little English. Beef jerky, cheeseburgers and Mazdas—the novelties one might find driving across the U.S. from Miami all the way to Los Angeles in the 1990s—were his introduction to the country.
Settling into a new landscape with new cultures and customs and an unfamiliar language was difficult. “Very few people understand how scary it is not to be able to speak English in the United States, particularly when you’re a child with brown skin,” Valderrama recounts in the memoir.
A part in a school play, Beauty and the Beast, got him onstage. “It unlocked something…. I didn’t look at my lack of English as a roadblock,” he says. “I just saw that I had to work around it. Then I learned how to speak English. And then I was a weapon. I was onstage doing the most, because at that point, it was just freedom.”
Mentorship and beyond
A few key mentors early on—and then many others along the way, up until today—helped him find his way. One such mentor, his acting teacher at Taft High School, urged him to audition for commercials. Not long after, another instructor noticed his potential and provided extra coaching, free of charge. His sophomore year, he landed one line in a regional commercial, but it wasn’t until the spring of his junior year—with many rejections in between—that he auditioned for a TV pilot called Teenage Wasteland. Today, you know it as That ’70s Show.
Four auditions later, Valderrama had the part. He’d play a character that America would come to know and love as Fez (short for “foreign exchange student”). Not only did the opportunity dramatically change his family’s financial outlook, but it also launched Valderrama’s career. His American dream began to unfold.
He details the poignancy of the moment in the book: “I took a breath and looked out the window into the evening Los Angeles sky. An American flag flew in front of our neighbor’s house, and I lingered for a split second in the enormous symbolism of this moment. I knew it now. I knew it without a doubt. Everything was possible in this new country of ours.”
The importance of gratitude
The seed of gratitude had been planted. When he speaks and writes about his career, Valderrama’s retelling sounds much like the sort of credits one might hear on an awards stage. He recounts the guidance offered by mentors, from high school teachers to Disney executives, Johnny Depp to Tom Hanks —and even Fez, who he credits in the book for giving him and his family “a far better life than we had ever imagined.” These opportunities and mentors helped him step into roles in independent films, launch TV shows and eventually initiate his own projects and companies.
“I’m just kind of dreaming out loud…. I don’t have a college education, but I put myself through metaphorical college by trying to learn everyone’s job on set, everyone’s job in the writer’s room and then everyone’s jobs in the production offices…. [If] I don’t understand it, I’m going to submerge myself in it,” he says. “I just continued to, in a way, bully my way into these offices and ask the most unnecessary questions—all because I had access to these incredible individuals who believed in me, who opened the door and said, ‘Hey, if you want to know how this works, I’ll let you know.’”
Some of these questions were as simple as, “Hey, how do you answer the phone?” or “How do you write a cover letter?”
“Now, being a CEO of multiple entities,” he continues, “I’m very grateful for the curiosity I had very early and that delusional feeling.”
Dreams born of hard work
Access, mentorship and a bit of benign delusion aside, Valderrama’s journey also took work—hard work.
While he thoroughly and enthusiastically acknowledges the support he’s received along the way, he also details how he believes that the boots-on-the-ground work he’s put in debunks the role of “luck”—at least, mostly. He believes that it takes work to create opportunities—“the harder you work, the luckier you become,” he says. It’s all part of his version of the American dream—his American Story.
He sees that same sense of work as vital to a unified, welcoming, prosperous nation. “The choice to be the United States of America—with emphasis on ‘united’—does take work,” he writes in the memoir. “It does require some adjustments.”
“I think that there’s unity in understanding that we don’t have to pick where we’re from, as long as we fight for where we live. And this is my home,” he explains. “Our beliefs and cultures should never be [lost] in the books of time—they should be kept up because that individuality is the flavor we give this country.”
From actor to USO Global Ambassador
This sense of gratitude and patriotism launched him into his service as a USO Global Ambassador. Over the span of 20 years, Valderrama has traveled to dozens of bases, from Afghanistan to South Korea, Bahrain to Poland and Germany to Greenland. During his 10 tours, he’s put on more than 50 shows for troops.
“I’m addicted to it, and I’m passionate about that exchange of love and mutual respect,” Valderrama says. “It gives me a perspective of the individual who puts on that uniform and says, ‘I’m going to go out there and secure the freedoms we have in the world and, most importantly, keep our country free.’
“Many of these individuals will never be known, and not everyone will get a medal,” he continues. “But their stories are something that really, really impacted me and changed everything about how I saw this country. To see individuals so selflessly wear that uniform and go out there… [and] physically [answer] the call, something bigger than themselves, made me love this country even more.”
Inspired by the symbolism of the uniform, Valderrama has ventured into a new creative field: activewear. In 2024, he founded E.P.U., a brand that not only channels the ethos of American service members but also gives back to them. The name is an abbreviation for “e pluribus unum,” which is Latin for “out of many, one.” A portion of every sale is donated back to USO causes.
“It felt like, in this moment, in our country, we have to remember what we do have in common,” Valderrama says. “The military and the individuals wearing these uniforms are nonpartisan. They literally obey the highest call of our country. And I thought, ‘Wow, in that uniform, you could be any color you want. You could be any preference you want—whatever you want to be. But when you wear that uniform, you’re one.’”
He recalls one of his first activations in the summer of 2024, in which E.P.U. was able to provide grants to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Compton, California, to fix up its property.
“The VFWs are just critical aspects of these neighborhoods,” he says. “They help all the veterans have a place of community, so that was really important to us…. The legacy of E.P.U. should be one of service [for] the people [who] serve our country and their families. So as we continue to grow the brand and the company, it’ll eventually turn into programs that help our future men and women of uniform process, understand and recognize trauma. We really want to help [with] mental strength and give them that better shot when they come home.”
Current projects
Today, in between tapings for NCIS (which is in its 22nd season, his 8th) Valderrama has a variety of behind-the-camera projects in the works. He founded an audio production company, WV Sound, and is a stakeholder in iHeartMedia’s My Cultura Podcast Network. He’s also established his own film and television production company, WV Entertainment, which makes everything from documentaries—like 2024’s hit three-part documentary series, Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult—to children’s shows.
“Our [Latino] stories are your stories, and I want to get to a point where we don’t have to say ‘Latino’ content because it just isn’t—our stories are non-Latino stories,” he explains. “They come from our Latino hearts, but our stories are for everyone. For our company, that’s number one.
“How do we… create a new wave of content that is for everyone but that continues to elevate my culture to a place where people say, ‘Oh, I didn’t think I could relate that much to that character because that character is brown. I didn’t think that hearing this podcast was going to actually give me so much perspective considering that it felt like it was culturally from a different place.’ I think that’s the type of recipe our company is going to be known for,” he adds.
Take, for example, Handy Manny, which ran for 113 episodes and landed as one of Disney’s biggest preschool shows in history. In his memoir, Valderrama reflects on the opportunity to introduce children to a character who is a hardworking businessman, proudly Latino and—in addition to being able to fix anything—seamlessly speaks English and Spanish. “Disney and I built something we could be proud of,” he says, “that my nephew and other kids of his generation could love.”
While he now finds himself behind a desk or microphone as well as in front of the camera, Valderrama is still dreaming just as big as the kid at the audition all those years ago was.
“As an actor, I never thought I’d be in a position to empower myself to play some of the things that I dreamed of playing, not waiting for somebody to have a script and me having to wait in line to actually try out,” Valderrama says. “Now, to be at a place where I can say, ‘I’m going to make that, and then I’m going to portray it [in a] way that I am excited to show audiences’—that’s a really empowering place to be.”
Valderrama’s biggest role yet
Valderrama is now tackling his biggest role yet: father. In February 2021, Valderrama and his partner Amanda welcomed their daughter, Nakano, into the world. In his book, he chronicles her auspicious arrival and the new meaning she brought to their lives, declaring that no success could compare to hearing his child’s heartbeat for the first time.
Today, she’s the audience he has in mind. At the end of his memoir, he promises to “do everything I can to leave you a better world” and offers her a shot of her own at the American dream.
In the meantime, he hopes to keep her as a fan.
“It’s a really exciting time, and I just hope that halfway through all of this, my daughter still thinks I’m cool,” he says with a laugh. “She cares because, right now, she’s like, ‘I want to see daddy’s show because I want to see daddy kick butt….’ But at some point, that becomes my biggest aspiration: make sure my daughter thinks I’m cool until I’m way, way older.”
This article appears in the January/February 2025 issue of SUCCESS Magazine. Photo courtesy of Nick Onken